The new development marks a significant leap in science-based animal tracking by using drones to fly over the Australian bush canopy to accurately locate radio-tagged animal populations. The drone technology has successfully detected miniscule radio transmitters weighing as little as a single gram, says lead researcher Dr. Debbie Saunders in a newsroom report by the ANU.

The small aerial robot will allow researchers to more rapidly and accurately find tagged wildlife, gain insights into movements of some of the world’s smallest and least known species, and access areas that are otherwise inaccessible, Dr Saunders explained.

The researchers have performed more than 150 test flights, proving that drones can now be used to “find and map the locations of animals with radio tags.”

Predictably, the technology has whipped up interest not only within Australia but the world over.

“Lots of people are trying to do this. It is not an easy process, but we believe we’ve come up with a solution,” said Oliver Cliff, a researcher at the Australian Centre for Field Robotics (ACFR), working at the University of Sydney.

We’ve had interest in our system from all around the world. We are still doing some fine tuning but we’ve achieved more than has ever been done before, which is exciting.

The Making of the Radio-Tag Sniffing Drone

As a wildlife ecologist, Dr. Saunders initially came up with the idea over eight years ago when looking to track small migratory birds that are endangered, like the swift parrot.

The bank behind the technology was put together by funding from the Linkage Project Grant and the Loro Parque Foundation. Dr. Robert Fitch and his team of researchers at the ACFR built and tested the drone system over the past two and half years.

Essentially, the entire setup consists of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) or a drone, a custom-built miniature receiver and an antenna. Real-time information is relayed to a laptop by the receiver and the antenna looking into radio-tracked wildlife.

Conventional tracking of animals involves GPS collars, which has its drawbacks.

“Radio tracking of collars manually is very time-consuming,” asserted ANU Associate Professor Manning, who helped the research team and was clear about the benefits of drone-based tracking.

Early indications are that the drones could save a huge amount of time. If you have two operators working, and they can put the drone up in two bursts of 20 minutes, they can do what would take half a day or more to do using ground methods.

The published paper titled ‘Online Localization of Radio-Tagged Wildlife with an Autonomous Aerial Robot System’ can be found here.

Image from Stuart Hay, ANU.

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Drones Are a Next-Generation Computing Platform, Says Intel

Intel announced the first Intel drone designed specifically for light shows: the Intel Shooting Star drone. With this drone, the company plans to demonstrate that drone light shows can redefine entertainment and create amazing new experiences in the night sky.

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While drones are being used by cops, border security forces, military and even first responders to an emergency, one researcher has shown that one government-ready drone model can be hacked from over a mile away to be taken control of by a malicious hacker, WIRED reports.

The exploit will be exhibited by security researcher Nils Rodday, showing flaws in the security of at least one government ready UAV. While there is no “easy fix” for the vulnerability, the drone’s manufacturer has been informed.

Rodday, a security researcher by profession and employed at IBM will demonstrate the flaws in the security framework of a UAV that costs anywhere between $30,000 to $35,000. The vulnerability lies in the drone’s radio connection which allowed him to take complete control over the quadcopter. The means to gaining the exploit? A laptop and a cheap radio chip, connected via USB.

The Drone Hack

Although Rodday doesn’t reveal the drone manufacturer or the specific UAV that he tested, the research was conducted at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. The drone, costing up to $35,000 is more expensive than conventional drone because of certain features including longer flight-time, eight rotors as opposed to four or six and the means to carry loads up to 2.9 kgs.

The three-foot wide drone has been deployed by police and fire departments with a flying time up to 40 minutes. Furthermore, it has also been used for inspecting windmills, power lines and aerial photography.

Rodday discovered that the drone’s telemetry module was fitted with an Xbee radio chip. The Wi-Fi connection used between the telemetry module and the user’s application is WEP or ‘Wired-Equivalent Privacy” encryption, a legacy protocol that can be infiltrated in seconds by any proficient hacker. With this alone, an attacker in the Wi-Fi range to break that connection could potentially send a “deauth” command to boot the drone operator off the network and take over.

Notably, the radio chip module converts Wi-Fi commands sent by the app into low-frequency radio waves. These waves are subsequently transmitted to the drone which houses another Xbee chip.

Rodday, armed with the two Xbee chips and a computer, set out to perform the hack.

He initially intercepted the Wi-Fi connection to boot the drone operator. Rodday was then made quick work of cracking the WEP protocol.

Although the Xbee chips had built-in encryption features, they were disabled in order to avoid latency concerns between the operato’s commands and the drone. This left the drone vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack.

This additional participant could intercept commands and take control of the drone, without even touching the drone’s command interface or the telemetry control box controlling the drone.

“If you think as an attacker, someone could do this only for fun, or also to cause harm or to make a mess out of a daily surveillance procedure,” Rodday told the publication.

You can send a command to the camera, to turn it to the wrong side so they don’t receive the desired information…or you can steal the drone, all the equipment attached to it, and its information.

The drone’s manufacturer who are now aware of the exploit, only plan on fixing it in the next version of the quadcopter. Amazingly, owners of the drone will be unable to patch the UAV since it cannot be connected to the internet, or be updated with a security patch. Rodday’s former advisor at the university claims that a patch –even if it can be downloaded onto a PC or tablet – is insufficient, calling for the product to be recalled. The security researcher claimed that the only way to truly ensure security while not compromising on latency would be using an extra module specifically for ensuring security for the UAV.

Rodday also claimed that the vulnerability existed beyond this one drone and its manufacturer, as calls made toward other manufacturers about how they secured the Xbee radio protocol went unanswered.

I think this vulnerability exists in a lot of other setups. The impact of the whole thing is bigger than this manufacturer.

Featured image from Shutterstock.

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The Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology (ICIT), a non-partisan group of innovation experts and firms that provides solutions to support and protect critical infrastructure, has questioned the AnonSec hacker group’s claim that it breached NASA’s internal networks and almost crashed a Global Hawk Drone in the Pacific Ocean. Hacked reported AnonSec’s claim on Monday.

AnonSec claimed that in 2013 it bought an “initial foothold” from a hacker who had knowledge of NASA servers, then started trying to find out how many computers they could break into and hijack. The hackers claimed they gained flight logs, employee personal information and video footage from the $222 million drone.

James Scott, ICIT co-founder and senior fellow, contacted Hacked and presented an assessment of the hacktivists’ claims.

Hacktivists’ Claims Scrutinized

An AnonSec administrator contacted a journalist and claimed to have exfiltrated between 100 to 276GB of data from NASA drone systems and servers, according to Scott. AnonSec also claims to have provided The Guardian and Wikileaks with copies of the encrypted data.

The next day, the hacker group provided “samples” of the data online, supposedly containing 631 aircraft and radar videos, information on 2,414 employees, and 2,143 flight logs.

AnonSec said it targeted NASA because they want the agency to disclose the amount of radioactive and hazardous chemicals in the upper atmosphere. AnonSec claims NASA obfuscated the real levels in an effort to diminish the global warming threat.

The hacktivist group has threatened to reveal its stolen data through The Guardian and Wikileaks if NASA fails to release its actual finding in the next month.

It released only a teaser video on the indexed Internet. Larger files allegedly from the breach have surfaced on the darknet, but the data hasn’t been verified.

Accessing NASA Servers

Scott said the group did not breach NASA systems through any sophisticated attack vector. They bought a foothold on the deepweb from a hacker with “knowledge of NASA servers.” The seller could have been a malicious threat actor inside NASA. Other accounts indicate the hacker could have established a presence by accidentally infecting a NASA system with the gozi virus.

AnonSec claims it used a sniffing program to steal a system administrator password. These stolen credentials allowed the group to access at least three network-attached storage devices (NAS) that contained backup copies of flight logs and data.

The group also claims to have focused on these systems in order to copy data as NASA employees uploaded new data. It targeted drone systems because the systems record chemical samples from the upper atmosphere. It dedicated members to the technical aspects of the breach like infecting new hosts, compromising camera systems or mapping the network.

Other members sifted through the allegedly stolen data.

Corroborating Claims Challenging

Corroborating or disproving the hacktivists’ claims may be difficult for security experts since the group claims to have deleted indicators of their network presence.

The current status of the breach is still at “claim” level and there has been no response from NASA or the FBI that legitimizes the claim, Scott said.

AnonSec claims it spent months in NASA’s internal network. Scott said it is hard to believe NASA hasn’t created a technologically sophisticated cyber barricade around its infrastructure.

What NASA Could Have Done

If AnonSec’s breach claim is accurate, NASA could have used the following methods to slow down the breach:

1) User behavior analytics. This is an early warning mechanism to detect user behavior abnormalities.

2) User behavior biometrics. This is another early warning mechanism that is valuable when used to detect physical abnormalities in users’ technical behavior.

3) Multi-layered field encryption of data in transit and stationary, including name, email, phone, etc. should each of these have individual encryption algorithms. If the adversary breaches the network and goes undetected and can exfiltrate information, they have to decrypt each field.

4) Ongoing penetration testing. This is penetration testing by skilled hired hackers to uncover vulnerabilities in the network and IoT attached devices.

5) Insider threat analysis. People who work at federal agencies with access to classified material must undergo direct and indirect psychological and lifestyle assessments to see if they are under threat or could become a threat. Credit profile, marital and family relationships, financial threats and professional satisfaction all play a role in assessing the possible threats from inside an organization.

6) Consider that each network, device, drone, NASA location is vulnerable and breached until proven otherwise by penetration testing and vulnerability assessment/risk analysis. Such simulations consider all known threat actors, exploits and vulnerabilities.

7) Change administration credentials from “default” to a creative combination.

The above information is based on what is known about the breach that AnonSec claims to have facilitated, Scott said.

What Did AnonSec Divulge?

Also contesting the credibility of the hack is that the leaked employee information only consists of names, email addresses and phone numbers. Much of that information is attainable on the open internet and the all of that information can be stolen from a hacked Microsoft Outlook account (or comparable email client).

The prototype hacker process begins with the following steps, Scott said. Knowing these steps can help organizations spot vulnerabilities.

• Reconnaissance. This is the social engineering phase, intelligence gathering on the target and various paths to the target
• Internal exploitation.
• Establish persistence and gain a foothold.
• Install tools.
• Move laterally throughout the network.
• Collect, exfiltrate and exploit.

Images from Shutterstock and ICIT.

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3.9 stars on average, based on 8 rated postsLester Coleman is a veteran business journalist based in the United States. He has covered the payments industry for several years and is available for writing assignments.

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